ok let’s break down what private browsing does. Say when I’m browsing the web on Chrome, Chrome will keep a log of my browsing history on my computer (this is called locally stored cookies). Now, back when the internet was new in like the 2000s, a lot of people would just watch porn or do generally embarrassing shit that they didn’t want their boss or family to find out about. So, what hackers used to do is to steal those logs (cookies), and blackmail the person saying “hey if you don’t give me money, I’ll tell your wife/parent/company that you went to these porn sites”
Enter private browsing. What it does is basically delete the logs on your device. And that’s why it’s often called porn mode.
BUT, say. someone is actually monitoring your internet activities. All they need is your IP address (the address you use to connect to the internet), all they need to do is trace your IP and see where you’ve been, whether that local logs have been deleted on your computer or not does not matter here, because they would already have a separate log from tracking your IP.
So how does Duckduckgo help? Essentially Google is one of the many websites that ALSO keep a log of all of your activities. So let’s say a govt operative wasnt tracking your IP, but is now onto you. what they can potentially do is request that Google handover their log of your online activities to them. Of course Google is going to say that it’ll never hand over your log to anyone, but isn’t it better if Google just don’t keep a log of you at all?
So this is what DDG offers. It is essentially a log-free version of Google.
BUT, DDG is a search engine, and not a browser. So what we should be looking at here is a browser that automatically uses DDG in its search bar. And for that, my recommendation would be Brave browser. In addition to having built in DDG, it also stops cross site tracking (for example, Google cant tell Facebook that you’ve been searching for a particular product and to sell you that product). This is mostly to stop marketers from selling you stuff.
But what about the govt operative tracking my IPs? Isn’t that the greatest concern here?
Yes! so there are two solutions to this. The most obvious one is a VPN. What a VPN does essentially is connecting u to a different IP address, and then let u browse from there. To give you an example, say I’m browsing from Hong Kong, I can tell my VPN provider to connect me to Korea first, and then when I go to Netflix. Netflix will think I’m in Korea. it’ll also be very hard to track my HK IP because to everyone else, I’m browsing from Korea. There are a variety of VPN options, like Nord, Surf Shark, Proton etc
The downside to this however, is that whoever is providing you with the VPN (the medium IP address), basically have a log of all of your activities.
So this is why my ultimate recommendation would be Tor. Tor is essentially a network of IPs, every time you connect to that network, it redirects you through a trillions of web addresses before you lend on the website you want to browse. Because of this, Tor is very, frustratingly slow. But also almost impossible to track.
To access Tor, you can either use Brave’s “Private browsing with Tor” feature, or the official Tor browser.
But because of how slow it is, what I normally do is use Brave with VPN for normal browsing. And Tor for anything potentially sensitive.
